In addition to availability on Windows 10 and Xbox Game Pass for PC (Xbox Game Pass for PC is currently in Beta), Microsoft Flight Simulator will also be coming to Steam on August 18. We are thrilled to announce that Steam pre-orders for the Standard, Deluxe, and Premium Deluxe editions of Microsoft Flight Simulator start today!
Listening to the community has been a priority for the development team since the announcement of Microsoft Flight Simulator in June 2019. Two of the most requested features we’ve been hearing about from the Community are TrackIR and VR support. Today we are excited to announce that Microsoft Flight Simulator will have TrackIR support available on day one, and VR support will be available later this year in time for the launch of the HP Reverb G2!
TrackIR
TrackIR is the premier head tracking solution delivering full six degree of freedom (6DOF) camera control for an ultra-immersive simulator experience. TrackIR allows simmers to enjoy a low latency mouse free look around with Microsoft Flight Simulator in full 4K/HDR, while still allowing easy interaction with a suite of hardware peripherals.
HP Reverb G2
Created by HP in collaboration with Microsoft and Valve, the upcoming Reverb G2 headset has a bright, high resolution display, excellent tracking, and immersive audio to take maximum advantage of Microsoft Flight Simulator’s incredible visuals and fully 3D soundscape. The HP Reverb G2 will be available later this fall and the VR update will be a free update for all Microsoft Flight Simulator players.
In addition to Track IR and VR, we also continue to work with partners like Honeycomb Aeronautical, Logitech G, Thrustmaster, Virtual Fly and many other manufacturers to further improve your Microsoft Flight Simulator experience. We are excited to support Honeycomb’s upcoming Bravo Throttle Quadrant and Thrustmaster’s new TCA Sidestick and Quadrant Airbus edition peripherals. We are also committed to supporting existing peripherals and home cockpits via an updated SimConnect.
Xbox Game Studios and Asobo Studio are committed to the community, and the ongoing support of Microsoft Flight Simulator with experience enhancing features like those we’ve announced today. But we have even more planned post-launch! In the future, we will update our development roadmap with continued simulator updates such as themed DLC bundles, free world updates and more. We will be sharing more news in the coming months.
Free World Updates
Microsoft Flight Simulator heralds a new era of data-driven flight simulation. One of the exciting implications of this is that the data that makes up the world is always improving, and players can look forward to a simulator that evolves over time. Thanks to our partnership with Bing, players will enjoy new, even better terrain, and an ever evolving, machine learning-fueled simulator that grows over time.
We have so much ahead for Microsoft Flight Simulator, but even on day one simmers will get highly detailed aircraft, a new checklist system, live air traffic, dynamic weather, new aerodynamic modeling, as well as all the many other features we shared in our launch date announcement, all within a beautifully crafted and rendered world. Whether you are new to flight simulation or an aviation pro, the sky is calling in Microsoft Flight Simulator.
While there has been a focus in the quantum computing industry on growing the number of qubits in a quantum computer, the reality is there are many important factors when building an overall system to bring quantum solutions to fruition. Hardware scaling, temperature control, software optimizations, and many other considerations must be reimagined in ways that allow large-scale quantum computers to do the necessary, meaningful work to solve some of today’s and tomorrow’s biggest problems. A question emerges that is both scientific and philosophical in nature: once a quantum computer scales to handle problems that classical computers cannot, what problems should we solve on it? Quantum researchers at Microsoft are not only thinking about this question—we are producing tangible results that will shape how large-scale quantum computer applications will accomplish these tasks.
We have begun creating quantum computer applications in chemistry, and they could help to address one of the world’s biggest challenges to date: climate change. In January, Microsoft launched a bold new environmental sustainability initiative focusing on carbon, water, waste, and biodiversity, announcing one of the most ambitious carbon commitments put forward by any company: Microsoft will be carbon negative by 2030 and remove from the environment more carbon than we have emitted since our founding by 2050. Last week, we announced seven important new steps on our path to be carbon negative by 2030. Learn more on the Microsoft on the Issues blog.
Microsoft has prioritized making an impact on this global issue, and Microsoft Quantum researchers have teamed up with researchers at ETH Zurich to develop a new quantum algorithm to simulate catalytic processes. In the context of climate change, one goal will be to find an efficient catalyst for carbon fixation—a process that reduces carbon dioxide by turning it into valuable chemicals. One of our key findings is that the resource requirements to implement our algorithm on a fault-tolerant quantum computer are more than 10 times lower than recent state-of-the-art algorithms. These improvements significantly decrease the time it will take a quantum computer to do extremely challenging computations in this area of chemistry. In our research, we have not only improved upon quantum algorithms and have shown how they can help effectively find new catalysts, we have also learned more about other quantum resources that are necessary to perform these calculations at an exponentially faster rate than classical computers. These learnings include the size of quantum computers and their runtime—and more generally how to better co-design a hybrid quantum-classical computing system to handle this type of problem. Our research is detailed in a paper called “Quantum computing enhanced computational catalysis.”
Carbon fixation: An opportunity in chemistry opens the door for a new application in quantum computing
Figure 1: In the catalytic cycle studied in our paper, a Ruthenium-based catalyst reacts with carbon dioxide and hydrogen molecules to produce water and methanol, leaving the catalyst unchanged to react with another carbon dioxide molecule.
Synthetic carbon fixation is a process that has potential to help greatly reduce carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by converting CO2 into other useful chemical compounds. Carbon fixation is not a new process. In fact, it is a very old one. Plants use a form of carbon fixation to convert carbon dioxide into energy-rich molecules such as glucose. But glucose isn’t the only possible biproduct of carbon fixation. When using different catalysts, natural or synthetic, carbon dioxide can be converted into other compounds.
Currently, synthetic catalytic processes are found through lengthy trial-and-error lab experiments. In a process that requires testing thousands of molecular combinations, computer simulations that very accurately model quantum correlations could replace complex synthesis of new candidate catalysts. Whereas computers today can have a difficult time accurately calculating properties of complex molecules, quantum computers are especially suited for this task and will give more reliable and predictive simulation results. We hope that quantum computers will complement traditional methods and, together, could reveal a process that both removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and provides valuable chemicals in return.
Why begin with a known catalytic reaction if the goal is to find new ones?
It’s important to first look at how these catalytic processes work in order to find ways they can be improved upon, especially exploring where quantum computers can make computational catalysis, a method to simulate catalysts already being performed on classical computers, more effective, more accurate, and less time-consuming.
In order to better understand how quantum computer algorithms can assist in discovering new, more efficient catalysts, we decided to focus our analysis on a previously published catalytic process based on the transition metal Ruthenium to convert carbon dioxide into methanol. It is also—like all known catalysts resulting in methanol to date—extremely inefficient. This inefficiency offers an opportunity for finding catalytic reactions that are more scalable. Using this reaction as a foundation for testing our algorithm, we were able to gain knowledge about how to best optimize algorithms for simulating these types of reactions on a quantum computer (see Figure 1 above).
Our algorithmic advancement: Boosting computational efficiency through compression
We need to develop more efficient algorithms for quantum computers because problems that involve calculating molecular energies with high precision, such as for catalytic processes, will be resource intensive—even on quantum computers.
ENGAGE Quantum Development Kit Are you a researcher or developer who wants to help in discovering new algorithms for quantum computers? Check out the Quantum Development Kit and Q#, a toolkit and high-level programming language for developing quantum algorithms, which allow you to try out a small chemical algorithm for yourself.
Obtaining high-precision energy estimates requires simulating the molecule’s quantum state for a long period of time, which is split into multiple smaller time steps. All the interaction terms in the problem description, the so-called Hamiltonian, need to be loaded over and over again at every single time step since quantum information cannot be copied. The natural approach to reduce overall runtime is then to reduce both the information that needs to be loaded as well as the number of time steps required for the simulation. One promising approach is to use a so-called “double-factorized” representation of the Hamiltonian. In this representation, the information describing the interaction between electrons is compressed into fewer terms.
In our research, we precisely achieve this runtime reduction by developing a new, efficient quantum algorithm. Our algorithm exploits the improved compression properties of the double-factorized form, and it also manages to perform the simulation with significantly larger step sizes compared to prior state of the art that exploits the unfactorized or single-factorized forms of the Hamiltonian. The extent of our improvement for molecules such as Ruthenium catalysts is driven primarily by the larger time step size, as illustrated in the table below. Moreover, aggressive compression can further reduce the number of terms at the cost of accuracy in the simulation. Importantly, our use of a so-called “qubitization” simulation algorithm allows for good control over the target accuracy. Combined, these factors reduce runtime by orders of magnitude for obtaining reliable results.
Ruthenium catalyst configuration VIII with 130 spin-orbitals
Approach
Number of steps per unit of time evolution
Overall algorithmic speedup
Unfactorized
10,600
1.0x
Single-factorized
42,200
0.4x
Our results
570
18.9x
Designing quantum computers for the hunt for new catalysts
The computational design of catalysts relies on very accurate energy calculations. Quantum computers can avoid uncontrolled approximations of classical simulations. They scale much better and open opportunities to assess the energetics of chemical species with sufficient accuracy. By using the Hamiltonian parameters generated on classical computers, a quantum computer could solve the exact energies of the chemical systems and help profile a quantitatively accurate landscape of reaction pathways. Catalyst structures could then be further refined or modified through the insights generated by reaction kinetics analysis. Such a process could iterate until a desired catalyst is found.
Figure 2: Protocol of quantum computing enhanced computational catalysis workflow. The energies of all species in the catalytic reaction cycle can be evaluated through the quantum computer using the output parameters of classical computers (upper right). The kinetics analysis (bottom left) can then be performed on the whole reaction pathways and new insights on the catalyst structures can be generated. This process repeats until an ideal catalyst structure is found.
Our paper is the first to show analysis of a quantum algorithm being done on a specific chemical reaction along the entire reaction pathway. Instead of just a single configuration, we analyzed relevant configurations of the reactants along this pathway. In addition, we performed state-of-the-art classical calculations, but our results with these confirmed that they lack reliability for truly predictive computational catalysis. Thus, one of the first roles for quantum computers will be not only to provide accurate results for novel catalysts, but also to benchmark validity of various classical approximations and develop better classical simulation methods.
Beyond this, we want to further optimize quantum algorithms to enable the simulation of larger numbers of electrons. Current algorithms limit the accurate quantum computation to so-called active spaces of the most correlated electrons. While that may often be sufficiently accurate, we will not know unless we can simulate larger active spaces or ideally all electrons in a molecule.
Finally, with the estimates for gate counts calculated, we were able to translate this information into potential runtime estimates for quantum computation on this problem. Depending on the assumptions made about future quantum computers, we estimate that it may take anywhere from a little over a day to several years to perform such calculations. This clearly shows the need not only for fast algorithms but also fast and scalable quantum hardware.
Our newer, faster quantum algorithm for calculating molecular energy levels is itself an exciting development and a crucial step in the computational catalysis workflow (see Figure 2 above), but it will take more than that to find an efficient catalyst. In fact, knowing more about the quantum algorithms needed to undertake improved computational catalysis opens the door to even more questions about the scale of quantum computers. What is the amount of memory we need to run these algorithms at a meaningful speed? What does this imply for the needed hybrid workflow and quantum architecture it runs on to successfully find these catalysts? Our results after testing this algorithm reveal some important discoveries going forward.
Where do quantum computers and chemistry applications go from here?
The research presented in this post is evidence that rapid advances in quantum computing are happening now—our algorithm is 10,000 times faster than the one we created just three years ago. By gaining more insight into how quantum computers can improve computational catalysis, including ways that will help to address climate change while creating other benefits, we hope to spur new ideas and developments on the road to creating some of the first applications for large-scale quantum computers of the future. The advancements in algorithms and knowledge gained from our research are a springboard for future work, including exploring additional ways algorithms can be made even more effective. Given the promise and potential that quantum computing represents for tackling the toughest challenges in chemistry, we hope to work alongside the chemistry community to better understand how quantum computers can be best utilized to further develop new chemical processes, molecules, and, eventually, materials.
We are encouraging those who are interested in exploring how chemistry can be impacted by quantum computing to explore Azure Quantum, which comprises a full set of tools, ranging from the Quantum Development Kit (QDK) and the Q# programming language for quantum to simulators and resource estimators. The QDK allows researchers to develop and test new quantum algorithms for chemistry, run small examples on a simulator, use Azure Quantum on quantum hardware, and estimate resource requirements to run simulations at scale on future quantum computers.
As part of the QDK, we developed a Q# chemistry library, with our partner Pacific Northwest National Laboratories (PNNL), that provides several fundamental data structures and tools to explore quantum algorithms for chemistry. If you are looking to get started with the QDK and Q#, check out our Microsoft Learn modules released at Microsoft Build 2020.
“This is the greatest show!” the pair sang loudly in celebration. Singing songs from The Greatest Showman, along with creating their own TV shows and doing impressions, had helped lighten the mood and focus their minds throughout the race.
They docked in Antigua a day and a half ahead of “the Northern lads”, and registered an overall time of 43 days, 15 hours and 22 minutes. That was enough to earn them 18th place in the overall standings. The winners, a British team of four men, completed the crossing in 32 days.
Now back in the UK, Cameron said everyone asks him the same question: why did you do it?
“At first I would say that I like adventure,” he said. “This is the ultimate challenge, it’s the Everest of rowing. It’s physical, it’s mental, it’s very technical. But I think the real reason is I wanted to understand why no other brother and sister had ever attempted this before. I now realise there is absolute strength in diverse teams. We brought out the strengths in each other, we found common ground and we created a fast boat.”
Their mother, Susan, couldn’t be prouder. “People would ask me how I could let both of my children go out into this great big ocean,” she said. “But how could I not let them go?
Ashen Winds is the latest Sea of Thieves monthly update, coming July 29 and free for all players across Xbox One, Windows 10, Xbox Game Pass and Steam.
Powerful Ashen Lords arrive on the Sea of Thieves in raging flames and blinding ash clouds – and their skulls can be taken and wielded as fiery weapons!
Accessibility improvements led by single-stick control, alongside new Pirate Emporium pets and discounts, round out this monthly offering.
This month’s Sea of Thievescontent is being served up hot – literally! Captain Flameheart’s manipulation of Stitcher Jim, Duke and countless other pirates on the seas has finally granted him the knowledge and resources he needs to transform some of his most trusted underlings into Ashen Lords. This July, pirates are tasked with taking down a fearsome foursome in Sea of Thieves’ latest monthly update Ashen Winds, available today for all Sea of Thieves players across Xbox One, Windows 10 PC, Steam and with Xbox Game Pass.
Lording It Up
July’s update centers on the rise of the Ashen Lords: four of Flameheart’s followers boosted by the blistering energy of the Ashen Curse, leaving them capable of causing huge destruction. These powerful skeletal foes have emerged across the Sea of Thieves and will strike back with fire, ash and flaming rocks at any pirates who dare to challenge them. The Ashen Lords have distinct personalities and different abilities to anything else seen on the seas, so seafarers must stay sharp at all times to ensure their defeat.
These emergent enemies will appear on islands indicated on the horizon by a raging tornado cloud, and will remain on the Sea of Thieves as a permanent threat to pirates. The Ashen Lords’ fires are far from burning out, and their hot-headed ways are set to rain fiery terror down on players for months to come!
All the Hot Gossip
In combat, an Ashen Lord can spit flame at its opponents – but even after defeat, it’s rumored that the Ashen Winds Skull left behind is potent enough to use as a deadly weapon. Take the cursed cranium and aim it at your enemies to use its fire for your own purposes, but be warned: constant use will drain its power, and reduce its substantial value to the Order of Souls. So if it’s the gold and reputation you’re after, a little restraint will go a long way. If not… fire at will!
Accessibility Additions
In a continued push to open the seas to everyone, more accessibility options are being added to Sea of Thieves this month. The most notable is support for play with a single analog stick, where players can opt to, well, play with just a single analog stick. All ship, pirate and menu controls are moved to your stick of choice, allowing anyone not comfortable with a traditional controller to reduce the number of held inputs required to set sail.
In addition there’s a new auto-centering camera option that ensures it always tends towards the horizon, and an auto-float mode to keep pirates with a dislike of the watery depths bobbing on the surface in a virtual lifejacket. With the number of options in the menu, there’s also a handy button to reset all accessibility options to their default state.
Pirate Emporium Scorchers
Ashen Curse pets are sizzling onto the scene with July’s update, and these charmingly charred critters are joined in the Emporium by new roleplay emotes for your pirates, based on the mannerisms of some of your favorite Sea of Thieves characters. If you’ve ever wanted to prop up the bar just like Duke or delve deeper into roleplaying as a Trading Company Emissary, you’re in luck.
Meanwhile, if you’ve been hankering to dress your four-legged friend in something that reminds you of your many-tentacled enemies, look no further: Kraken cat outfits have reached the Emporium, so your cute kitty can trot about in a dapper new outfit inspired by a terrible behemoth!
There’s also a sale coming to the ship livery aisle of the Pirate Emporium, with a range of Rare-inspired ship bundles (paying tribute to games as diverse as Banjo-Kazooie, Viva Piñata and Perfect Dark) getting a sweet 35% discount to mark Rare’s 35th anniversary. Check out the Pirate Emporium page for all your window shopping needs.
Find Out More
For more information on the AshenWinds update, including full release notes, visit the Sea of Thieves website. The update is available for free to all Sea of Thieves players who have bought the game on Xbox One, on Windows 10 PC or via Steam, or players who have access to it with Xbox Game Pass. Simply download and install the latest Sea of Thieves update to get access.
New to Sea of Thieves? Join the fun with our Maiden Voyage, a narrative-driven tutorial experience separate from Adventure and Arena modes. New Sea of Thieves players will begin their travels within this scenario, which provides guidance and information to fledgling sailors. Learn more about Sea of Thieves at www.xbox.com/seaofthieves, or join the ongoing adventure at www.seaofthieves.com where you can embark on an epic journey with one of gaming’s most welcoming communities!
Today, we are excited to announce that the Microsoft Family Safety app, designed to help you protect your family’s digital and physical safety, is starting to rollout today on iOS and Android.
Over the past few months, I have been using the preview with my family, and it has been a game-changer! As a kid, my two favorite things to do after school were to ride my bike and play soccer with my neighborhood friends. Nowadays, my kids are always on their devices, whether playing video games with their friends, on social media or learning remotely. Kids have access to more information and endless ways to connect with other people. This can be scary for parents. As a mom, I seek to give my kids the independence to learn and grow whilst ensuring that they are also safe online and in the real world. Today, I am excited to share with you how any family worried about their kids’ online safety can benefit from the Microsoft Family Safety app and how it has helped us to create healthier habits for my kids, while also giving my wife and me peace of mind.
Here are the top 5 ways my family has benefited from the Microsoft Family Safety app:
1. Use the weekly activity report as a conversation starter.
Every week, parents and kids receive an email with highlights of the child’s digital activity. This creates a great mechanism to drive a conversation between parents and kids about how much time they are spending on their devices and what websites and content they are viewing. Last week, the weekly activity email for my youngest showed that he had spent 30 hours playing Minecraft. Believe me, that started a conversation!
Below you can see an example report that parents and kids receive.
2. Limit screen time for play and make more time for learning.1
In recent months, we have all spent a lot more time at home. This means that my kids have naturally spent more time on their devices. However, much of this time is necessary since their schooling and summer camps have moved to remote learning. One of my favorite features has been the ability to set app and game screen time limits. These limits give my kids the flexibility to be on their devices more for learning but help keep them focused by limiting the amount of time they can spend on other apps and games. My wife and I can also give them more screen time if they run out and request additional time, providing our family with the right level of flexibility for our busy schedule and changing needs.
Below is an example of how parents can set up app limits.
3. Set healthy boundaries with web and search filters.2
This is one of the features that has provided me the most peace of mind. In the past, my seven-year-old son has unknowingly come across some unwelcome search results. With the Family Safety app, we have been using web and search filters to block adult content and set browsing to kid-friendly websites with either allowed or blocked websites list. This feature works in a tight concert with the Microsoft Edge browser on Windows, Xbox, and Android. My son now feels empowered to explore online, knowing we set up a safe place for him to explore and we know he is safer online.
Below is an example of how parents can set up content filters and help ensure a safer web browsing experience.
4. Get purchase request emails to avoid surprise spending3
Have you ever received a credit card bill with a bunch of unexpected app store purchases? I have and it is not a fun surprise! I love that I get an email request before one of my kids can purchase something from the Microsoft Store. This has limited surprises and allowed us to talk about purchases before they happen, instilling more responsible spending habits.
5. Know where your family is when things start to open back up.4
When things eventually open back up, Family Safety will also help you to stay connected in the real world. Location sharing lets you see each of your family members’ last known location on a map and save favorite locations like “home” to see, at a glance, that everyone is safe and sound.
It is also important to me that my family’s privacy is protected. I am not a fan of apps that sell or share my family’s location data to third parties. Microsoft Family Safety provides you full control around how and why data is collected and used. Unlike other location-tracking apps, your family’s location data will not be sold or shared with insurance companies or data brokers.
These are just a few ways my family has benefited from the app. In addition to my own kids’ feedback (and they have a lot!), we have also learned more about what all our other preview users want to see in Family Safety as we evolve the app. Our team has been hard at work making improvements based on this early feedback. Here are just some new user benefits that we have already implemented:
We added a new feature to block or unblock specific apps.
We updated our designs to be more accessible and inclusive (i.e. improved visual contrast to help low vision users and provided additional context for screen reader users).
We added more time options for parents to quickly respond to requests for screen time (i.e. you can now easily add 15 minutes, 30 minutes, 1 hour, 2 hours, or 3 hours of more of screen time).
We added location clustering to see when multiple family members are at the same location (i.e. when multiple people are in one place you can see that there are 4 people and zoom in to see who it is).
And this is just the beginning. We are excited to launch Family Safety and we will continue to add new features to help you protect your family. In the coming months, we plan to introduce two premium features that will be part of Microsoft 365 Family subscription: (1) drive safety5 to help to build better habits behind the wheel with insights on driving behavior and (2) location alerts to notify you when a family member arrives or departs a specific location. We are also in the process of working to bring digital safety features to iOS to set screen time and content filters on iPhones.
1 Windows, Xbox, and Android apps and games only. 2 Enables SafeSearch with Microsoft Edge on Windows, Xbox, and Android. 3Applies to apps and games downloaded from the Xbox and Microsoft stores; these settings can be managed at family.microsoft.com. 4 Location permissions must be active. 5 Drive Safety features will be available only in the US, UK, AUS, and CA.
Collaboration will build pathways to financial security and provide tools for sustainable growth
PURCHASE, N.Y., and REDMOND, Wash. — July 28, 2020— On Tuesday, Mastercard and Microsoft Corp. announced a collaboration to shape the future of digital commerce, drive startup innovation and enable financial inclusion. The collaboration will accelerate Mastercard Labs’ cloud native research and development activities, enabled by Azure and AI, to advance Mastercard Labs’ mission to de-risk and commercialize emerging technologies and platforms for digital commerce. Through access to technical expertise and cutting-edge technologies, Mastercard’s partners will be further empowered to build and securely scale new solutions.
“We are thrilled to deepen our longstanding relationship with Microsoft by advancing the research, development and scaling of new technologies and business models,” said Ken Moore, executive vice president and head of Mastercard Labs. “This strategic collaboration will strengthen and extend our cloud services and capabilities for clients and fintech partners, sparking innovation and creativity for the ecosystem. It will enable us to explore opportunities focused on new client segments, technologies and trends as we continue to drive financial inclusion and build the future of commerce.”
“Mastercard’s commitment to innovation and financial inclusion has accelerated digital commerce for individuals and businesses around the world,” said Judson Althoff, executive vice president of Microsoft’s Worldwide Commercial Business. “We look forward to building on our strong relationship and accelerating co-innovation to help connect and power a digital economy for everyone, everywhere.”
Empowering fintech innovation, advancing digital commerce
Capitalizing on Mastercard’s global network and leveraging Azure’s global reach, the collaboration will enable Mastercard’s ecosystem of partners to explore the use of emerging innovations and new commerce capabilities such as devices that enable digital payments in new ways. Through access to Azure technologies, augmented and virtual reality and Internet of Things, fintech partners will be empowered to create new user experiences to advance how consumers, businesses and governments exchange value.
Mastercard’s Start Path program has assisted with the development of over 230 fintech companies worldwide, democratizing access to financial services. Building on that momentum, the collaboration will expand support for the fintech community by helping diversify and build new businesses, and create and scale new cloud-first digital products and services.
Enabling financial inclusion
Mastercard and Microsoft share a commitment to ensuring people in underserved communities have access to digital products and services to realize their full potential. The collaboration will advance Mastercard’s vision to improve the lives of people by building pathways to financial security and access to critical services. The Azure cloud environment will serve as the native infrastructure for Mastercard Labs’ inclusion efforts and support Mastercard Community Pass — a platform that pulls together complex ecosystems and provides underserved communities with access to essential services, such as education, agriculture marketplaces and basic healthcare.
Microsoft Azure provides Mastercard — and the ecosystems they jointly serve — with a scalable and flexible platform imperative for establishing secure connections and protecting data, co-innovating with partners and delivering access to financial services
About Mastercard
Mastercard (NYSE:MA) is a global technology company in the payments industry. Our mission is to connect and power an inclusive, digital economy that benefits everyone, everywhere by making transactions safe, simple, smart and accessible. Using secure data and networks, partnerships and passion, our innovations and solutions help individuals, financial institutions, governments and businesses realize their greatest potential. Our decency quotient, or DQ, drives our culture and everything we do inside and outside of our company. With connections across more than 210 countries and territories, we are building a sustainable world that unlocks priceless possibilities for all.
Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT” @microsoft) enables digital transformation for the era of an intelligent cloud and an intelligent edge. Its mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.
For more information, press only:
Microsoft Media Relations, WE Communications for Microsoft, (425) 638-7777, rrt@we-worldwide.com
Note to editors: For more information, news and perspectives from Microsoft, please visit the Microsoft News Center at http://news.microsoft.com. Web links, telephone numbers and titles were correct at time of publication, but may have changed. For additional assistance, journalists and analysts may contact Microsoft’s Rapid Response Team or other appropriate contacts listed at https://news.microsoft.com/microsoft-public-relations-contacts.
With the global pandemic, customers are relying on remote work more than ever, and Windows Virtual Desktop is helping customers rapidly deliver a secure Windows 10 desktop experience to their users. Charlie Anderson, CIO of Fife Council in the United Kingdom, was planning to modernize his companies’ existing Remote Destop Services (RDS) infrastructure, and then business requirements changed. He needed increased agility and scale to meet the changing requirements. In his own words:
“Windows Virtual Desktop was absolutely essential for us in terms of our response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Like many, we were faced with a continuity issue unparalleled in recent times. For us, this meant not only the continuation of services we already delivered, but also responding very quickly to new demands arising as a result of our public response to the pandemic.
To do that, we needed to provide as close to the “in-office” experience as we could to a workforce now working away from our offices. This meant multiplying previous remote working capacities by a factor of 15 almost overnight – something which would have been impossible without a scalable and cloud-based approach, which also worked well on a range of Council and self-provided devices.
There is little doubt that the Windows Virtual Desktop solution will not only be vital to the future resilience of our public services to the people of Fife, but it will also form a key part of our future device strategy as we seek to develop new, agile, and cost-effective approaches going forward.“
In April 2020, we released the public preview of Azure portal integration which made it easier to deploy and manage Windows Virtual Desktop. We also announced a new audio/video redirection (A/V redirect) capability that provided seamless meeting and collaboration experience for Microsoft Teams. We are humbled by the amazing feedback we’ve received from you on these capabilities, and that’s been a huge motivation for our team to accelerate development. We are happy to announce that both the Azure portal integration and A/V redirect in Microsoft Teams are now generally available.
Azure portal integration
With the Azure portal integration, you get a simple interface to deploy and manage your apps and virtual desktops. Host pool, workspace, and all other objects you create are Azure Resource Manager objects and are managed the same way you manage other Azure resources.
Customers who have existing deployments based on the previous (classic) model can continue using it. We will soon publish guidance on migrating to the new Azure Resource Manager-based deployment model so you can take advantage of all the new capabilities, including:
Azure role-based access control (RBAC)
You can use Azure RBAC to provide fine-grained access control to your Windows Virtual Desktop resources. There are four built-in admin roles that you can get started with, and you can create custom roles if necessary.
User management
Previously, you could only publish Remote Apps and Desktops to individual users. You can now publish resources to Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) groups, which makes it much easier to scale.
Monitoring
The monitoring logs are now stored in Azure Monitor Logs. You can analyze the logs with Log Analytics and create visualizations to help you quickly troubleshoot issues.
A/V redirect for Microsoft Teams
Many of you use Microsoft Teams to collaborate with your colleagues. Traditionally, virtual desktops have not been ideal for audio and video conferencing due to latency issues. That changes with the new A/V redirect feature in Windows Virtual Desktop. Once you enable A/V redirect in the Desktop client for Windows, the audio and video will be handled locally for Microsoft Teams calls and meetings. You can still use Microsoft Teams on Windows Virtual Desktop with other clients without optimized calling and meetings. Microsoft Teams chat and collaboration features are supported on all platforms.
The collaboration is part of a broader partnership between T-Mobile and Microsoft that has grown over the past few years as T-Mobile, which merged with Sprint in April, has sought to disrupt the wireless industry and establish itself as a product-focused innovator.
Those efforts culminated most visibly at Microsoft’s global Hackathon last July, when an eight-person T-Mobile team spent several days working alongside Microsoft employees on a remote-controlled car called T-Racer that uses machine learning and edge computing.
The project provided insights on both sides: T-Mobile learned about network latency and performance across different types of edge computing, and Microsoft was able to assess how its machine learning models were impacted by network connectivity.
Perhaps as importantly, the Hackathon enabled T-Mobile to present itself as a technology company at a high-profile event that draws more than 27,000 participants to Microsoft locations worldwide.
“So many people were surprised to see T-Mobile there because we’ve traditionally been seen as just a telco. We’re now a technology company,” says Rainya Mosher, “cultural architect” for T-Mobile.
“It was a great opportunity for us to say, ‘Hey, we are a tech player. We’re out there on the edge of the frontier with our great partners like Microsoft.’ It was a wonderful opportunity to get to say that and have fun while doing it.”
The event was also a chance to connect with developers who could be future employees, Mosher says.
“We have such a strong brand in the consumer market, but it’s not as strong in the developer community,” she says. “They don’t realize we’re looking for people who want to come in and do something differently in a cutting-edge environment. So it became an employer brand opportunity as well.”
The T-Mobile team included employees from across the company who had worked together remotely, but some hadn’t met in person before. Mosher says the Hackathon fostered connections and a spirit of collaboration that lasted beyond the event.
T-Mobile’s remote-controlled T-Racer. (Photo by Scott Eklund)
“We were able to leave our normal responsibilities behind and just come together,” she says. “It created this place where you have these great relationships and get to work collaboratively on a common problem. That’s a lot harder to create in a normal work week.
“It increased the sense of community within T-Mobile once we got back to our day jobs.”
***
T-Mobile has long used Microsoft technologies in its products and services, but the relationship between the two companies has recently evolved into a true partnership, says Gina Kirby, a senior Azure specialist who works closely with T-Mobile.
“There has always been a synergy between the two companies, but we hadn’t necessarily dug in so deep as to build things together,” she says.
That changed about three years ago, when T-Mobile sought to use blockchain technology, which allows digital information to be distributed but not copied, to improve security for internal identity management. T-Mobile reached out to Microsoft about its Azure platform capabilities — and specifically its enterprise blockchain service, which was created to help businesses build applications on top of blockchain technology.
T-Mobile had been working alongside Intel, another Microsoft partner, on the Next Identity Platform, an open source blockchain-based identity governance platform. The T-Mobile team wanted to ensure the integration with Microsoft’s technologies was both technically advanced and operationally mature. To further those goals, Microsoft hosted a “code with” event at its campus, where teams from the two companies worked together for a week to develop solutions.
“Bringing the team into Microsoft’s innovation space and sitting side by side with their experts allowed us to rapidly accelerate developing system designs, data flows and ultimately production-quality code,” says Chris Spanton, principal architect of emerging technology strategy for T-Mobile. “We were able to solve complex technical challenges and in the process, develop lasting relationships and a deep sense of co-ownership over the outcomes.”
T-Mobile thanks customers with free gifts on Tuesdays. (Photo by Diane Bondareff/AP Images for T‑Mobile)
Microsoft also worked with T-Mobile around the 2016 launch of T-Mobile Tuesdays, a customer appreciation app that offers weekly promotions, freebies and a chance to win prizes. The offers are limited to certain hours of the day, which led to traffic spikes that threatened to overload T-Mobile’s platform.
“Sometimes we had challenges when we couldn’t handle the traffic loads that we get on Tuesdays,” says Abigail Franco, director of Product & Technology at T-Mobile, who previously oversaw the T-Mobile Tuesdays team.
“For the first few weeks, we had the Microsoft team at T-Mobile 24/7. Microsoft was there with us and helped us get back on our feet. That was huge.”
More recently, Franco says, Microsoft is partnering with T-Mobile to upgrade its Azure-based platform to handle an anticipated uptick in T-Mobile Tuesdays participation following the Sprint merger.
“We have been trying to build knowledge in-house to make sure we can support our Azure solution, but it’s not the same as having the expertise from Microsoft to guide us through the process, provide best practices, tell us specific areas we should look out for and give us recommendations on how to test various scenarios and proof-of-concepts before we start building a solution,” Franco says.
“It’s been immensely helpful to have the Microsoft team support and help us with that effort.”
***
In 2018, T-Mobile launched a new event aimed at raising awareness about data science and identifying budding data scientists within the company. Datapalooza brings together about 150 data scientists, software engineers, and data and business analysts who work together in teams to solve specific problems with generic data sets over two days.
T-Mobile’s data-analytics platform is built on Azure, and Microsoft provides training to Datapalooza participants on using the platform in the weeks leading up to the event. Microsoft engineers are also on-site during Datapalooza to assist teams and serve as judges.
Microsoft’s experience with large hackathons helped shape T-Mobile’s event, leading to the addition of mentors and other details, says BK Vasan, T-Mobile’s director of data engineering and advanced data analytics.
“We were thinking about something small, but Microsoft partnering with us helped us shape this into something bigger,” he says. “That partnership is very fundamental for T-Mobile. We were able to show the entire division that we have a scalable platform we can run advanced analytics on. At the same time, we were able to rapidly provision the platform for multiple users in less than a day.”
“I think that’s a powerful statement that we were able to make in partnership with Microsoft,” Vasan says. “That gave us confidence, not only for my team, but also the senior leadership in terms of yes, we do have a viable platform for advanced analytics.”
That platform, he says, eventually became T-Mobile’s advanced analytics platform, T-Insights, used by more than 10 of the company’s teams.
Beyond Datapalooza, Microsoft has provided input on using Azure for advanced data analytics, IoT and marketing initiatives, Vasan says. “We do a lot of visioning with Microsoft in terms of tech strategy for the future.”
T-Mobile’s T-Racer was a highlight of the 2019 Microsoft global Hackathon. (Photo courtesy of T-Mobile)
Like much of life in the U.S. at the moment, both companies’ work has shifted during the coronavirus pandemic. An Azure-focused hackathon that T-Mobile and Microsoft were planning is now on hold, and Microsoft’s global Hackathon is going fully virtual this year.
Still, Kirby says Microsoft envisions its partnership with T-Mobile as a long-term effort, and T-Mobile plans to put together a team to participate virtually in this year’s global Hackathon. This time around, T-Mobile will be exploring how Microsoft technology can help the company create even more inclusive user experiences for employees and customers with physical disabilities.
For Garg, who worked for Microsoft from 2006 to 2011, the pet tracker collaboration gave him a new perspective on his former employer. Microsoft’s evolution into a “customer-first company” was evident in its team’s approach of focusing first on what the product needed to do for T-Mobile’s customers, then determining what technologies met those priorities, he says. And it underscored Microsoft’s cultural shift under CEO Satya Nadella to a new era of collaboration.
“When I think about my relationship with Microsoft, it’s not a customer-vendor relationship. It really does feel like a partnership,” Garg says. “It feels like a relationship of friends that are trying to solve shared objectives.
“With Microsoft, it’s never about, ‘I’m trying to sell you something.’ It’s like, ‘How am I going to help use the set of things I have to solve your customer problem?’”
Top photo: A very good dog shows off a T-Mobile SyncUP PETS tracker. (Photo courtesy of T-Mobile)
In a worldwide first that could jumpstart a long-forecast clean energy economy built around the most abundant element in the universe, hydrogen fuel cells have powered a row of datacenter servers for 48 consecutive hours, Microsoft announced Monday.
Diesel fuel accounts for less than 1% of Microsoft’s overall emissions. Its use is primarily confined to Azure datacenters, where, like at most cloud providers around the world, diesel-powered generators support continuous operations in the event of power outages and other service disruptions.
“They are expensive. And they sit around and don’t do anything for more than 99% of their life,” said Mark Monroe, a principle infrastructure engineer on Microsoft’s team for datacenter advanced development.
Lucas Joppa, Microsoft’s chief environmental officer, is Microsoft’s representative on the Hydrogen Council, a global initiative of leading energy, transport and industry companies to spur the hydrogen economy. Credit: Roderigo De Medeiros
In recent years, hydrogen fuel cell costs have plummeted to the point that they are now an economically viable alternative to diesel-powered backup generators.
“And the idea of running them on green hydrogen fits right in with our overall carbon commitments,” Monroe said.
What’s more, he added, an Azure datacenter outfitted with fuel cells, a hydrogen storage tank and an electrolyzer that converts water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen could be integrated with the electric power grid to provide load balancing services.
For example, the electrolyzer could be turned on during periods of excess wind or solar energy production to store the renewable energy as hydrogen. Then, during periods of high demand, Microsoft could start up the hydrogen fuel cells to generate electricity for the grid.
Hydrogen-powered long-haul vehicles could pullup at datacenters to fill their tanks.
“All of that infrastructure represents an opportunity for Microsoft to play a role in what will surely be a more dynamic kind of overall energy optimization framework that the world will be deploying over the coming years,” said Lucas Joppa, Microsoft’s chief environmental officer.
To further explore how Microsoft can leverage its investment in hydrogen fuel cells and related infrastructure, the company today named Joppa as its representative on the Hydrogen Council, a global initiative of leading energy, transport and industry companies to spur the hydrogen economy.
Scientists have already proved that hydrogen fuel cells can be used to generate greenhouse gas-free energy from the most abundant element in the universe, Joppa noted.
“We know how to do it,” he said. “The council exists because we don’t necessarily know how to scale the generation of hydrogen, transportation of hydrogen, supply of hydrogen and then consumption of it in the various ways that we would like to. There’s still tons of work that needs to be done.”
Replacements for diesel
Mark Monroe, a principle infrastructure engineer on Microsoft’s team for datacenter advanced development, is leading a project exploring the potential of hydrogen fuel cells to power backup generators at datacenters. Credit: Mark Monroe/Microsoft.
Microsoft strives to provide Azure datacenter customers “five-nines” of service availability, which means that the datacenter is operational 99.999% of the time. Backup generators are fired up during power grid outages and other service interruptions.
“We don’t use the diesel generators very much,” Monroe said. “We start them up once a month to make sure they run and give them a load test once a year to make sure we can transfer load to them correctly, but on average they cover a power outage less than one time per year.”
Microsoft is researching replacement technologies to diesel that would maintain or improve service availability and sees promise in hydrogen fuel cells and batteries, explained Brian Janous, general manager of Microsoft’s team for datacenter energy and sustainability strategy.
“The work that the team is doing today is really looking at trying to evaluate the feasibility of different solutions,” he said.
Batteries already supply short-term backup power, filling the 30-second gap between an outage on the grid and the time it takes to power up the diesel generators. More advanced batteries have longer durations.
“If you get to a scenario where the durations that you require are of such a length that batteries cease to be effective, that’s when you would spill over into looking at something like fuel cells,” Janous said.
Proof of concept
Power Innovations built a 250-kilowatt fuel cell system to help Microsoft explore the potential of using hydrogen fuel cells for backup power generation at datacenters. In a proof of concept, the system powered a row of datacenter servers for 48 consecutive hours. Credit: Power Innovations.
The seed for using hydrogen fuel cells for backup power was planted in spring 2018, when researchers at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colorado, powered a rack of computers with a proton exchange membrane, or PEM, hydrogen fuel cell. Monroe and his colleagues were on hand for the demonstration.
“We got intrigued because we knew that they were using an automotive fuel cell,” Monroe said. “An automotive fuel cell has the reaction time like a diesel generator does. It can turn on quickly. It can be ready for a full load within seconds. You can floor it, let it off, let it idle.”
PEM fuel cells combine hydrogen and oxygen in a process that produces water vapor and electricity. Automotive companies are developing the technology to power cars, trucks and other vehicles. After the demonstration, Microsoft started thinking about using fuel cells for backup power at datacenters.
Monroe’s team procured a 250-kilowatt fuel cell system, which is sufficient to power a full row, on the order of 10 racks, of datacenter servers. Tests began at Power Innovations, the system developer, outside Salt Lake City in September 2019. The system passed the 24-hour endurance test that December; the 48-hour test this June.
“It is the largest computer backup power system that we know that is running on hydrogen and it has run the longest continuous test,” Monroe said.
The next step for the team is to procure and test a 3-megawatt fuel cell system, which is on par with the size of diesel-powered backup generators at Azure datacenters.
Fuel cell explorations
Brian Janous is general manager of Microsoft’s team for datacenter energy and sustainability strategy. His team is exploring replacement technologies to diesel powered backup generators. Credit: Scott Eklund/Red Box Pictures.
Even before that 2018 demonstration, Microsoft had been looking at ways to use fuel cells. The company started to explore fuel cell technology in 2013 with the National Fuel Cell Research Center at the University of California, Irvine, where they tested the idea of powering racks of servers with solid oxide fuel cells, or SOFCs, which are fueled by natural gas.
“They have the ability to make their own hydrogen out of the natural gas feed that they get,” Monroe explained. “They take natural gas, a little bit of water, they heat it up to 600 degrees C, which is the temperature of a hot charcoal fire.”
That’s hot enough for a process called steam methane reformation that generates a stream of hydrogen atoms for electricity generation.
Microsoft has continued to explore the potential of SOFC fuel cell technology to provide baseload power, which could free datacenters from the electric power grid while making them 8 to 10 times more energy efficient. For now, though, the technology remains too expensive for widespread deployment.
The SOFC process also produces carbon dioxide, which is another reason that Microsoft is exploring PEM fuel cells, Monroe noted.
In addition, estimated costs for PEM fuel cell systems for backup power generation at datacenters have fallen more than 75% since the demonstration at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. If the trend continues, in a year or two the capital costs of fuel cell generators could be price competitive with diesel generators.
The increased production of fuel cells to meet the demand from the datacenter industry could potentially further drive down costs, he added.
“We very much see ourselves as a catalyst in this whole hydrogen economy,” Monroe said.
Hydrogen economy
From Microsoft’s perspective, other parts of this economy include infrastructure to procure, store and maintain a sufficient supply of green hydrogen to power the backup generators for 12 to 48 hours, which is standard in the industry to enable those “five nines” of service availability.
For example, for 48 hours of backup power generation, each datacenter would require up to 100,000 kilograms of hydrogen to fuel the backup generators for an extended power outage, Monroe said.
Internal conversations about how to secure this infrastructure have led to discussions about the role Microsoft could play in spurring the hydrogen economy, Janous noted.
“What if you could take all of these assets the datacenter has and integrate them into the grid in a way that helps to further accelerate decarbonization of the grid more broadly rather than just a point solution for the datacenter itself,” he said. “That’s where I think all of this gets interesting.”
Top image: Microsoft used hydrogen stored in tanks on trailers parked outside a lab near Salt Lake City, Utah, to fuel hydrogen fuel cells that powered a row of datacenter servers for 48 consecutive hours. Credit: Power Innovations.
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John Roach writes about Microsoft research and innovation. Follow him on Twitter.
Last June, when I shared the 5 principles driving a customer-obsessed identity strategy at Microsoft, many of you had embraced the idea of a boundaryless environment, but relatively few had implemented it in practice. A global pandemic made remote access essential and forced many of you to accelerate your digital transformation plans.
The new reality requires not only supporting secure remote productivity and collaboration, but also other remote operations, such as onboarding, offboarding, and training employees. And this reality will continue for the near future. According to our most recent Work Life Index, 71 percent of employees and managers (Information Workers) reported a desire to continue working from home at least part-time post-pandemic.
Your experiences and insights have helped shape the investments we’re making in our identity services for the coming year and beyond. Today, I’m sharing with you the updated set of guiding principles we’re following to deliver a secure and scalable identity solution that’s seamless for your end-users.
Secure adaptive access
An identity system that is secure from the ground up continues to drive our product investments. In a recent survey of over 500 security executives, achieving a high level of protection without impeding user productivity was rated the number one challenge. Using risk-based Conditional Access policies in Azure AD, you can protect sensitive data with minimal friction to your end-users. This combines the power of Identity Protection with Conditional Access to only prompt users when the sign-in is considered risky.
To enhance identity security, we’re investing in compromise prevention technologies such as security defaults, attack blocking, and password protection, as well as reputation and anti-abuse systems. Security mechanisms like end-user notifications and in-line interrupts can help everyone defend themselves from malicious actors. Every day, our data scientists and investigators evaluate the threat and log data to gather real-world insights, so they can adjust our machine learning algorithms to recognize and protect our customers from the latest threats.
Our product and ecosystem investments are guided by embracing Zero Trust security strategy as our worldview. We build Azure AD on the principles of Zero Trust to make implementing this model across your entire digital estate achievable at scale.
Seamless user experiences
When your employees need to get things done, delivering a great user experience is essential. Employees who interact directly with customers, patients, and citizens need tools that are simple to learn and use. Because an easy, fast sign-in experience can make all the difference for your users—and your Help Desk—we’re continuing our investments in Firstline Worker scenarios to address the challenges they face, for example, by providing seamless handoffs of shared mobile devices and enhancing tools and workflows for managers.
We’ve seen more interest than ever in minimizing the use of passwords and eliminating them completely. We continue our commitment to identity standards that help scale the technology and make it more useful and accessible for everyone. We’re also developing easy-to-use self-service options for end-users, such as managing security information, requesting access to apps and groups, and getting automatic recommendations for approved applications based on what peers are using most.
Your customers, business partners, and suppliers also deserve a great, consumer-grade sign-in and collaboration experience. With the External Identities feature in Azure AD, we are investing in making it easier for organizations and developers to secure, manage, and build apps that connect with different users outside your organization.
We’re also looking ahead to technologies that respect everyone’s privacy, such as decentralized identity systems and verifiable credentials, that can verify information about an individual without requiring another username and password. Verifiable credentials are based on open standards from W3C and leverage the OIDC protocol, so you will be able to incorporate them into your existing systems.
Unified identity management
It’s hard to scale and manage security when you have overlapping products from multiple vendors that need to work together. You have a portfolio of on-premises and cloud-based applications that you need to manage and provide secure access to your users. We are simplifying these experiences in Azure AD, making it easier to manage all your applications for all your users in a single place. We’re also consolidating our APIs into Microsoft Graph to unify programmatic access to and management of data across workloads in Microsoft 365, including Azure AD.
By embracing open standards, we can help you more easily manage and secure your hybrid environment. We’re working with partners like Box and Workday to further deepen our product integrations and streamline identity processes. Azure AD is pre-integrated with thousands of SaaS applications, and more to come, so you can provide users one set of credentials for secure access to any application. We are continuing to extend capabilities in Azure AD so that you can migrate access for all your applications to be managed in the cloud.
Simplified identity governance
While having the ability to control access requests, approvals, and privileges in a timely and efficient manner is key, traditional identity governance and privileged access management solutions can be cumbersome and inflexible. This is true particularly now that these workflows are more often done remotely than in person. Providing every user access to the apps and files they need should be as simple as defining access packages and group assignments upfront. Onboarding and offboarding employees then become easy with an automated solution connected to your HR system.
We want to help more companies adopt these scenarios and incorporate our machine learning technology in Azure AD to provide better recommendations and alerts in response to unusual behavior or too many unnecessary privileges. Our goal is for these capabilities to span both employee and external identity scenarios, built in the cloud for maximum benefit. This will help strengthen your overall security, efficiency, and compliance.
The last several months have been a whirlwind for all of us. We’re in it with you, committed to helping you on your digital transformation journey. Whatever happens, you can be sure that we’ll continue to listen to your feedback and input, so we can evolve our engineering priorities and principles to help you stay ahead and prepare for what comes next. Thank you for your continued trust!
To learn more about Microsoft Security solutions visit our website. Bookmark the Security blog to keep up with our expert coverage on security matters. Also, follow us at @MSFTSecurity for the latest news and updates on cybersecurity.
